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Monday, June 25, 2012

The Fairy (June 28th and 29th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE FAIRY screens Thursday June 28th at 7:45 pm and Friday June 29th at 5:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Every two months when the Cleveland Cinematheque's
printed schedule (on paper! Google it, kids) comes out, I await with some
trepidation program director John Ewing's sidebar essay. Ewing sometimes tells tales from behind the scenes that
make it sound like running a hip indie destination movie house is not always
fun. His latest describes an irate patron declaring she was done with the
Cinematheque because of its showing Jean-Luc Godard's WEEK-END, one of the
great transgressive features of French cinema.

Okay, here's where the Cleveland Movie Blog is partially
at fault. I should have had a review of WEEK-END posted in time to warn the
public, but somehow that title got past me. WEEK-END, from 1967, is a
nightmarish, angry, even proto-punk take on modern civilization, in which an
upscale French couple drive into the countryside for a weekend idyll,
only to get caught up in an endless one-lane traffic jam, sometimes with
burning vehicles and dead/dying bodies still lying around in a landscape of
industrial-nihilist horror. When they leave their vehicle, the protags somehow
get caught up in a kind of takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, except there's hints
of kinky sex. I forget how it ends. I'm not sure Godard was much into endings
at that stage. Yes, WEEK-END is not a crowd-pleaser. In fact, I can't even call
myself a complete fan of it; if you're not part of the beret-wearing,
gauloise-smoking leftist-intellectual crowd, pic's vibe could be summed up as
the world's best bad student film. As a lot of Godard could.

So that's what we should have said. Though this lady,
doubtless an east sider, has never heard of the Cleveland Movie Blog; got all
her info from the Plain Dealer movie pages. The way things are going with that
newspaper chain right now, the Cleveland Movie Blog may be around longer than
the Plain Dealer movie pages, hehhehe... Big deal. Fat cats on the east side
still won't know about us.

It's a pity this disgruntled ex-Cinematheque goer hadn't
waited until now for her patronage, as the Cinematheque has another, more
recent (2011) French "art film" that indeed does lighten the heart
and enrich the soul (I can't much imagine Jean-Luc Godard liking it, too). It's
called THE FAIRY, which hails from co-directors and performers Fiona Gordon,
Domenique Abel and Bruno Romy. These folks are some kind of Franco-Belgian
comedy troupe of filmmaker-comedians, who gained attention a few years ago for
an almost entirely dialogue-free farce called THE ICEBERG. Now they've done THE
FAIRY, which follows a similar tradition of crazy pantomime-art and slapstick
that made Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Max Linder, Jacques Tati, and, aye,
let's never forget Jerry Lewis. You just know that Cleveland east siders can't
get enough of Jerry Lewis.

Dom (actor Domenique Abel, who looks like a
Franco-Belgian Roberto Benigni) is a bored, bicycle-riding clerk at a hotel in
Le Havre. One night he listlessly checks in eccentric Fiona (Fiona Gordon), a
spacey woman who declares herself to be fairy, granting wishes wherever she
goes. Dom, given three wishes, asks as his first for a scooter with unlimited
gasoline, then romance-adventure. Fiona immediately sets about making his
wishes come true - or at least Dom finds a new scooter in the office the next
morning.

The rubber-limbed Fiona, it seems, is not above stealing,
smuggling and freeloading in her monomania to make various wishes around town
come true. Very soon Dom and Fiona are lovers, and soon they're on the lam from
cops, asylum doctors and other authority figures, in a cartoon-panel landscape
of sight gags, puns, deliberate artifice and oddball recurring background
characters (a hard-of-hearing club DJ with his ear inches above the vinyl).

The gently absurdist-surreal narrative (as opposed to
WEEK-END's aggressive absurdist-surreal one) is one more reliant on dialogue
this time than the virtually silent ICEBERG. And though it drags in parts, one
senses that Jacques Tati (who also could drag in parts) would approve the
message. Fiona Gordon, who sort of looks like Frances McDormand, is
unconventionally sexy as she is funny, and her faux-underwater dream ballet
with Abel alone is likely more enchanting and fun than anything could be in the
ghastly-sounding "I Dream of Genie" remake that's been on Hollywood's
agenda since the 1990s (Lisa Kudrow dodged a bullet there).

So there you are, you stupid, narrow-minded bourgeois
east-side-of-Cleveland plutocracy. By boycotting the Cinematheque you are
missing out on one of this city's
finest... Oh, wait a minute. I just broke into John Ewing's Chamber of Secrets,
just to see what he had. It was an autographed Number 23 Cavs jersey - still
not defaced or burned. Never mind what I said. DEATH TO THE CINEMATHEQUE! DOWN
WITH EWING! Thankyouverymuch, you've been a great audience. (3 out of 4
stars)